RUDIMENTS, pt. 1091
(some guy named ken healy)
'I and the public know what
all schoolchildren learn. Those
to whom evil is done do evil
in return.' That was W. H.
Auden, who used to live, in
my days there, down at the
bottom of St. Marks Place,
at the sight of two concrete
lions at the entryway. Those
lions looked miserable, were
withering; sizzling away, from
the acidics in the air, as well
as the hacking pollution of
morons who'd smash away
at at them every so often,
with a hammer or a mallet.
Sad scene, how all that anger
comes out. Auden used to have
the most lined face I'd ever
seen - not even knowing his
true age, he looked, to me, 110
already then. The last I saw,
a few years back anyway, the
remnants of two 'lions' were
still there. Two 'somethings'
anyway. The rest is all forgotten,
and will remain that way. You
need grandeur? Go see the large
lions at the 42nd street public
library. If they even let people
in anymore.
-
I never knew much about
anything, even though I studied
and delved. Foreign places stayed
foreign; other tongues and habits,
cultural ways and means, stayed
a'distant to me. I managed Spanish,
and a little French (hated that). The
too-fast rapido of most NY Hispanics
left me in the dust, so I kept it to just
being able to read. Latin was my
basis of the rest. On the other hand,
German was far and away the most
tendentious and perplexing of the
languages I dealt with. The sense
of connectedwordcoldness, as they
would put it, killed me. You 'take'
a concept and then string words
about that concept's relevance
together, all in a nasty row, to get
another word ABOUT that combined
concept, in a word. How weird is
that?
-
Voracious probably was my best
watchword. By 1962 I was already
lost in the words and jiggles of that
day, and I was but 12. I was away
too, remember - seminary crap just
kept me bottled up. I was ready to
explode by December. Neo this
and neo that; 'new-journalism,'
people writing, all of a sudden, in
a fictional mode but with non-fiction
elements. Introducing 'Self' as a
character; one guiding the reader
through the created world such a
narrator had put together. It was
cheating, a set-up. Fiction, and
non-fiction, both, were completely
transformed and anything read had
to be accused, first, of slant. Of
steering the reader. Like slumlords
of buildings, these persons became
slumlords of words. The words they
wrote. Here: The 'author' makes
something up, and then brings his
or her self into it, as a character,
witnessing, guiding - and even
sometimes explaining - what has
been introduced or been going on.
Not quite 'Deus ex machina,' but
somewhat close to 'Doofus ex...'
-
I watched words and ideas get
deconstructed - ground down to
nothing-at-alls, mere suggestions
of an idea thrown in. One had, then
better carefully read the proverbial
small print, a la any of them : 'All
information is seen as useful.
Inaccurate information is in itself
accurate information about the
informant [telling the information].
The accidental did not figure. Many
people are intolerant of the accidental.
This was something more - as all
behavior was seen as purposeful.'
-
Perhaps that was so. Within a few years,
entering the 1970's I realized that the
more intense focus to events which I'd
gone through living there had a different
backlight that the usual, crummy and
workaday world - where most things
meant nothing and all of life seemed
dedicated - unless one was Dorothy
Day or something - to the pursuit
of the glib : ease, pleasure, satisfaction
and the rest of that. Hedonism of an
American sort? (I used to think of
the Marx Brothers and their 'Hail
Fredonia' schtick, merely renaming
it 'Hail, Hedonia!'). Hey, private jokes
kept me afloat.
-
I've studied deep and hard, lots of
language, writing, composition, reading,
and commentary stuff; all it's ever got
me was appreciation, on my part, for
what others have done. I remember the
cold, Winter days of half-twilight, in
the basement of NYC, Studio School,
just devouring books - watching
people's feet pass by in the small,
elevated window above me. It was
as quaint as it was odd - an entire
history of Humanity, passing daily
by me, in dark Winter coats, freezing
and bundled, all these people in their
normal, workaday NYC world, and
mostly silent too. Flurries of snow
tossing about, and then, every so often,
a real snowfall - a white city, with
changed noises, all the wet and moist
drag of tires and wheels. The entire
landscape, whatever it may have been
changed; altered drastically. Piles
of snow atop the iron fenceposts at
the Church of the Transfiguration, and
the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian. Local
reference-points, each. I would walk
that lower Fifth Ave section often,
starting at One Fifth, a storied place
I'd read of so many other times.
I was bundled too, but my mind was
as naked and free as at some Gaugin
embroidered Tahitian beach. No fetters
attached, and gun for hire.
-
A person can read and read (and, yes,
I had a friend through the Studio School
and the San Francisco Art Institute - in
fact, I was sleeping with his sister! - who
wanted to burn all books, never read again,
claiming it was deadening, malicious, and
detracted from experiencing real life! Try
that one, Hitler!) and still go nowhere.
-
There are levels of reading. You can
simply 'read' any old informational
packet of trash, and take little away.
At the same time, it was possible to read,
say, 1975 American dispatches from the
miserable, failed USA rushed-exit from
its destitute Vietnam crusade, and have
learned, hidden deep with the copy of
the dispatches, valuable information:
'I would skim the stories on policy
and fix instead on details - the cost
of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks
before Phnom Penh closed was five
hundred dollars American. The colors
of the landing lights for the helicopters
on the roof of the American embassy
in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The
code names for the American evacuation
of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively
were EAGLE PULL and FREQUENCT
WIND. The amount of cash burned in
the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon
before the last helicopter left was
three-and-a-half million dollars American
and eighty-five million piastres. The
code name for this operation was
MONEY BURN. The number of
Vietnamese soldiers who managed to
get aboard the last American 727 to
leave Da Nang was three hundred
and thirty. The number of Vietnamese
soldiers to drop from the wheel wells
of the 727 was one. The 727 was
operated by World Airways. The name
of the pilot was Ken Healy.'
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